Enter the world of One Folgate Street and discover perfection . . . but can you pay the price?

For all fans of THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN and GONE GIRL comes this spellbinding Hitchcockian thriller which takes psychological suspense to the next level.

Book Review:

It might be a little artificial to identify a sub-genre just from book titles. But with the success of books like Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train, there is definitely a trend emerging for domestic thrillers with the word “Girl” in the title. The presence of the word in the title does not denote the often cosy romantic worlds of chick-lit but a harsher, page turning reality. They are usually narrated (at least partially) by a woman (or the ‘Girl’ of the title), that narration is often suspect to the point of being completely unreliable, and there are violent or abusive men but it is often hard to tell who is the manipulator and who is the manipulated. Part of the pleasure of these thrillers is the constantly shifting power dynamics (even if the nature of the narrative is often that it is only the reader’s perception of these dynamics that is actually shifting).

Into this mix comes a potentially big novel for 2017 – The Girl Before. The Girl Before ticks all of the Girl book boxes in spades. It has two unreliable female narrators, a supporting cast of abusive and potentially violent men and plenty of domestic thrills. It is also, when it cares to be, a reflection on architecture and how it has the power to reflect and shape us.

Emma (then) and Jane (now) are both seeking somewhere new to live. The narrative constantly shifts between the two as they fall in love with and then are approved to live in the ultra-modern house at 1 Folgate St that would normally be well beyond their means. Gaining approval to live in the house requires the completion of a strange psychometric exam and once selected, signing up to a brutal contract full of conditions. Once installed, the house, and its architect Edward Monkton, start to play an increasingly large (and increasingly creepy) part of their lives.

To say any more about the plot or even the structure of the novel would be to give away too many spoilers. JP Delaney, pseudonym for a British crime author, uses this dual narrative structure to highlight the similarities between the lives of his two protagonists but also how their personal differences impact on those similarities. Delaney manages through this structure to ramp up the tension. Jane (and the reader) knows something happened to Emma, the question is what that was and whether Jane can prevent it happening to her. Many of the twists, though come directly from the unreliability of the narration – the fact that one of the narrators has deliberately not mentioned something important or flat out lied.

The Girl Before is, in the end, an effective thriller that almost invites reading in a single sitting. The set-up is bizarrely intriguing. Much of the tension revolves around the idea that people can be caught in loops of behaviour – trying to replace someone they have lost with someone similar. And the digressions on the nature and power of modern architecture give some much needed texture to the plot. Unsurprisingly, film rights have already been snapped up for this one, so don’t expect the Girl-thriller train to slow down any time soon.

Hattie Hoffman is the brightest of the bunch. A small town girl with big dreams, Hattie is counting the days until her high school graduation is all over and done with so she can proceed with the life that she really wants to lead; that of an aspiring actress in New York. Hattie loves her parents and enjoys hanging out with her friends but the Hattie they all see is an act. The real Hattie dwells within and is nothing like the girl everybody thinks they know.

Book Review:

THE LAST ACT OF HATTIE HOFFMAN has a lot of balls in the air at once and does an admirable job with the interplay. As with any small town crime, the suspects are taken out of a smaller pool and you are able to examine each viewpoint for clues. Flipping between past and present it features the viewpoint of Hattie, the Sherriff tasked with investigating her murder and that of the new person in town, Peter Lund. There are only a few small irks with this read. Perhaps it’s too much of a sensitive insight but it does veer close to victim blaming. The strength of this read is in the cast of characters, all unique and drawn with economic strokes but with warmth and purpose.

Ignore all the book comparisons as it doesn’t do this clever little mystery justice; it is all about the journey here and the big reveal is not the tantalizing part of the read. THE LAST ACT OF HATTIE HOFFMAN is a very satisfying read and deservedly one of the buzz books of the summer.

At midnight on 28 December 1864, in the Australian gold-mining town of Daylesford, young newly-wed Maggie Stuart lies dead in her own blood. Rumour and xenophobia drive speculation over the identity of her killer, and when a suspect is apprehended, police incompetence and defence counsel negligence bring yet more distortion to the wheels of justice.

A missing teenager, drugs, yachts, the sex trade and a cold trail that leads from Sydney to Norfolk Island, Byron Bay and Coolangatta. Can Cliff Hardy find out what's really going on?

Will one man's loss be Hardy's gain?

'I'd read about it in the papers, heard the radio reports and seen the TV coverage and then forgotten about it, the way you do with news stories.'

A missing girl, drugs, yachts, the sex trade and a cold trail that leads from Sydney to Norfolk Island, Byron Bay and Coolangatta.

Book Review:

Many years ago there was a specialist bookshop tucked away in Auburn Road, Hawthorn run by a crime fiction expert and massive enabler (I think his name was Malcolm Campbell). He was one of those real-life people that made me thankful I'd made the trek from the bush to the big city, and Peter Corris was another. Sure I probably would have eventually found his books, but arriving in the city, finding that shop, and eventually being introduced to Cliff Hardy, kind of reinforced at that time it had been a good move all round.

From the opening book in the Cliff Hardy series, here was something that was familiar, and yet slightly different about them. They are, as further study eventually revealed, straight out of the lone-wolf, private eye rule book, and yet quintessentially Australian. They are also very Sydney - with the mean streets that Hardy lived on never that far from the Harbour, yet there is something in the quick-fire delivery, and the quiet determination that reeks of the laconic Australian character. Put a hat on him, push it back on his head and roll up his sleeves and Hardy could have been a man from the bush. Stick him in a Ford, hand him a glass of wine, and have him haunt a few coffee shops and bars and he was city through and through. Part of the appeal of Cliff Hardy is that he has always been as hard to pin down - age / background / look and feel, as he has been instantly recognisable.

But forty-two books later, Cliff is flagging a little, but game as always, and Peter Corris has pulled the plug, battling a few health problems of his own. So reading WIN, LOSE OR DRAW is one of those jarring moments no matter how you look at it. It's the last ever book of a series that's become as part of all fans January's as has a food hangover or the Test Cricket. It's certainly always been my Boxing Day Test tradition - flat out on a couch, test on in the background, Cliff Hardy book in hand. Glass of white wine beside me.

It also appears that the decision to call it quits on the series happened after the book had been written - so there's no maudlin fare-the-well's, no tying up of any long-standing questions (not that there really are that many, expect maybe how bloody old is Cliff really!). What we have in WIN, LOSE OR DRAW is classic Hardy, hired by a wealthy businessman, Gerard Fonteyn, to find his teenage daughter. Julianna has been missing for over a year and despite a number of other granted half-hearted attempts there's never been a hint that she's dead or alive. Initially Hardy is inclined to agree with this assessment, but a photograph that eventually comes to light is just enough for him to get out, kick some rocks and see what crawls out.

A nicely complicated plot is elegantly executed with plenty of opportunity for even a slightly cricket distracted reader to keep up, but as always at the heart of these books is the tough-guy, lone-wolf, rough-around-the-edges, good-bloke Cliff Hardy. Even exiting this way, on a high, solving the unsolvable, never looking back, never saying goodbye, no regrets, no apologies, kind of makes sense. It won't make fans feel any better come next January, but then there are 42 of these books that you can always re-read. That's a lot of January's.

A missing teenager, drugs, yachts, the sex trade and a cold trail that leads from Sydney to Norfolk Island, Byron Bay and Coolangatta. Can Cliff Hardy find out what's really going on?

Will one man's loss be Hardy's gain?

'I'd read about it in the papers, heard the radio reports and seen the TV coverage and then forgotten about it, the way you do with news stories.'

A missing girl, drugs, yachts, the sex trade and a cold trail that leads from Sydney to Norfolk Island, Byron Bay and Coolangatta.

Book Review:

There is no denying Peter Corris’ status as the godfather of modern Australian crime. Corris took the American private investigator corner of the crime genre and made it uniquely Australian. Still going now after 33 years, gumshoe and Sydney icon Cliff Hardy is back in action for the forty-second time in Win, Lose or Draw.

Hardy is hired by Gerard Fonteyn, a wealthy businessman, to find his daughter Julianna. Julianna has been missing for over a year and there is little prospect that she will actually be found. Hardy does some digging and agrees with this assessment. But months later a photo of someone who could be Julianna comes to light on Norfolk Island and Hardy is off. Very soon the search becomes extremely complicated involving drugs, under-age prostitution, murder, corrupt police and dodgy investigators. All in all, a typical Hardy scenario.

Win, Lose or Draw delivers exactly what it promises – a hard boiled jaunt through the seedier parts of the Gold Coast and Sydney. Hardy, although starting to show is age (if he aged at the same rate as normal people he would be about 80 by now), is still as tough as ever. Even tied up and looking at the prospect of being dumped at sea he still manages a hard boiled quip or two. The plot, as always, appears straight forward at first but even Hardy admits about two thirds of the way through that it “made my other missing persons cases look simple”. Complicated, yes, and with plenty of conflicting agendas which often collide violently and tragically, but Corris never lets the reader lose track of what is going on.

Win, Lose or Draw is vintage Corris and vintage Hardy. While there are secrets there is no great mystery to be solved, just hard graft of procedural detection. The tension slowly ratchets but doesn’t quite pay off in the way the reader expects, there is a dead pan noir sense of humour and with locations sketched economically but perfectly to give a great sense of place. The author bio suggests that this might be the final Cliff Hardy book. If so then Corris has ensured that his Sydney Private Eye goes out on a high.